


the fall

by maikuria



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Fort Terminus, Hurt No Comfort, Monologue, Other, Rilla is only mentioned sadly, first contribution to this fandom besides art and it's This huh?, mind the warnings guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 18:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20394205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maikuria/pseuds/maikuria
Summary: ‘Destroy the lizard,’ comes the order. ‘Kill him, and we’ll bring the human back to you.’Damien’s entire world comes to a halt.(Or: when the Senate captures Rilla, Damien has a choice to make.)





	the fall

The Senate has Rilla.

It matters not how they got her. Completely irrelevant, the ways she must have fought _(of course she would have fought, the only way she wouldn’t have would be for her to be dead and… and Damien doesn’t want to think about that)_, all the things their genius herbalist must have flung against whoever captured her. The Senate has her, what matters now is to set her free.__

_ __She must have been very brave,_ __Damien thinks__. _My forever flower. She has always been so brave. My Rilla…__ _

He imagines, even now, that his precious Amaryllis must be giving them quite a fight. There’s no other possibility. His ferocious piece of lion’s heart would not take any assault sitting. She must be fighting.

But even that’s irrelevant. The Senate will never let her go. It has sunk its claws, evil and rotten, putrescent, into their love, and it won’t let go until it tears them apart. It’s tearing him apart.

He feels like a child. He’s shaking. The numbness stretches past his stomach, his limbs, his neck. His tongue settles into his mouth like lead. Damien can talk. He can. He swears he can. But the words aren’t coming out. The words are stuck in his throat with all the sharpness of his very own sword and his Rilla, his Amaryllis, his beloved, his forever flower, oh saints, oh she’s gone, she’s gone, she’s _taken— _

“Honeysuckle,” Arum calls out, softly. In his voice, his posture, his eyes, Damien can see love and fear, the kind that combine into insurmountable, world-ending anger. The lizard reaches out for his hand, somehow tender, like a prayer. “Do not worry for Amaryllis, we’ll get her back.”

_ How ironic,_ a part of him offers as he catches his breath. Once he hunted for Arum—his lily, his love, his heart— in vengeful search for his beloved Amaryllis. Today, they part together, to save her from the monsters with nothing human in their eyes.

———

During those first, uncertain days, as they settled into love and adoration, worked their way to communication and understanding, Arum had looked at Damien and Amaryllis, gathered in his arms, and thought he would follow them into the end of the world. In later days, he quietly swore by it.

Of course. _Of course_ the Universe would decide to test that theory. Of course Arum would follow through.

They follow the Senate’s trail all the way into the edge of the world. Amaryllis matters more than sleep, food or rest. Perhaps she wouldn’t agree if she were with them, but her very absence is the problem. Sometimes, he persuades Damien into sleep. Sometimes, Damien persuades him. It’s not often enough.

Fort Terminus is as they last left it, a monster stronghold, a barren piece of once-lively land. Arum is not one for wasting time picturing an unknowable past, but he imagines it must have been beautiful, once. He wonders what the garden must have been like.

_ (Was it full with lovely flowers, then? If the tapestries Damien described exist, do the ghosts of lovers reside there? Does their love haunt the fossils of withered seeds?) _

There’s a ghost haunting this place, one they both know well. When he follows Damien into the fortress, he feels a shiver of terror down his spine.

They keep walking.

———

_ ‘Destroy the lizard,’_ comes the order. _‘Kill him, and we’ll bring the human back to you.’ _

Damien’s entire world comes to a halt.

Arum is nearly unconscious and disoriented, courtesy of an attack against the Keep _(and Damien should be worried about the Keep, he should be)_. His head lies in Damien’s lap, eyes half closed and haunted. It breaks Damien’s heart to see him like this, makes him shake with agony.

So he bows his head and speaks his heart.

“Saint Damien,” he whispers through a shaking voice. “Oh, Saint Damien, how can I ask for tranquility? What can I do when my heart has been ripped into two bleeding pieces, and set against each other in these wicked monsters’ game?”

Arum stirs slightly, and slowly, painfully, Damien pushes him away. He can’t stay still. He can’t.

“They have asked me to…_kill him_.” The words get caught in his throat. He forces them out, still, for otherwise he would never be able to face them. “They have asked me to rip my love’s heart out from between his ribcage and cast it out to the end of the world, down the Terminus Falls.”

He is shaking as he stands, sorrow holding his entire body down. His armor feels heavy. The knife he carries, the one Arum gave him so long ago, burns him with its presence. He tries, he really does, but his fingers can’t close around the handle, and his knees give out under him again.

“_Rilla!_” He sobs. “My Rilla, my beloved, my betrothed, I cannot abandon her. But to ask me to kill my Arum… to betray him when he is as terrified as I am,” his jaw tightens, his eyes burn, “there is _no world,_ Saint Damien, not a single world in which I could bear to raise my blade against him with the aim to harm, to end his life! I would sooner drive myself into the monsters’ claws!”

He screams. The anger echoes against the walls. He stands once more on shaking limbs. He’s alight.

Finally, finally, his fingers close around the hilt. Damien tears the knife from his hip and screams. He hurls it away. The knife hits the wall. He stumbles with the force of it and yells until his throat feels raw.

_ “How can I be asked to choose?_” He demands, broken, from Fort Terminus’ ceilings. “Not even you, Saint Damien, with your endless calm, could ever pick between the two halves that make you whole! Could you cast away an essential part of yourself, bleed yourself to _death_ by forsaking one of the people you love most? How can I ever choose? When they both mean so much and hold my heart and soul in their joined hands, how am I supposed to slice them apart?”

His voice breaks again. He’s trying, oh saints, he’s trying to keep his breathing even, to not let panic overwhelm him and he’s failing. The tears fall, fall and keep falling. His hands grasp his head in an effort to steady himself, can’t find his center.

“Oh, Saint Damien,” he pleads, voice strangled. “Your guidance, your guidance, _please_, your guidance, your divine help, please!”

His body convulses with grief. The last word comes out raw and loud. Through the pain, he keeps talking. He can’t stop. He can’t keep the words at bay anymore.

“_Yes_. Yes, Lord Arum is a monster. I know he is a monster. And by the order in which I became your knight, I should be able to kill him.” He sways as he picks the blade up again, stares at it as an agonized gasp escapes his throat. “I should be able to take this knife, and run him through with the same ease I have vanquished foes from the Citadel! _I could do it with my eyes closed, once!”_ He jerks, stabs the knife in the wall with all the strength he has. He falls against it, and the knife holds his entire weight as he cries. “But I _can’t!_ I cannot, saint Damien! Not my Arum, my heart, my lily, _my love_! To hurt him…. to hurt him would be like bringing hurt unto myself and to my Rilla!”

He lets go of the knife. As his knees hit the floor, he lets his forehead rest against the cold, humid wall. He closes his eyes and he can see her, Rilla, beautiful and endlessly brilliant, smiling down at him on those long, slow days in the Keep. He can feel her hands on his hair. He can remember her eyes, shining, wide and joyful on the nights of the Festival of the Three. His lips quake.

“Oh….. Rilla,” he breathes out. “Rilla, you would never forgive me! You would never allow me to place your life over another’s, much less… But you, Rilla, you said my heart would never betray you and what if this is how it does? If I can’t save you… if I can’t sacrifice my heart for your own…” He pauses. “My heart… for your own…”

One, two, three. He tries to breathe again. Slow. One. Two. Three. Angelo would count for him. One. Two. Three. Rilla would sing to him. One. Two…

“Oh, my treacherous heart,” he breathes out, voice barely above a whisper. “I was tasked to protect you, Rilla, but I cannot hurt Arum. He would give his _life_ for you, my love, I know he would. But I cannot take that life from him. Even now as I think of it, my very bones forsaken the idea. He is a monster, our love, but his eyes…” He shakes his head, tries to force his mouth to silence. “_I love him._ I love him and to hurt him… my heart shakes, my body quakes… my voice falters. I can’t. I can’t. _I can’t._”

_ “What do you expect me to do, Saint?_” With a yell, he punches the wall with both fists. _“What would you have me do?” _

Didn’t he ask something like this, that night? The night where their third duel was supposed to take place. The night Arum stole Rilla away.

“I told you…. oh, I told you, once, that I should be honored to kill him! But I _couldn’t!_ I could not kill him then and I cannot kill him now!” He rises once more, hands shaking as he raises them towards the knife imbedded in the wall. He can’t take it. He drags his nails down the stone instead. “Not after everything, not after baring my soul and heart to him and receiving his in turn! I had Rilla before I had Arum, saint, and we were happy, you know we were! But now… I could never be happy again without them!”

He pictures them both now, delighted in their own ways as their experiments come through. Arum picking Rilla up and twirling her around. Rilla shouting out with glee. He sees the image clearly in his mind, a sight he pictured a thousand times over, and his heart aches.

“If they asked me to, saint,” the words fall off his mouth like a confession, “I would leave them. That day, when Lord Arum gave me a choice, if I had thought they would have been happier, I would have left, without caring for my own heart and future. You know I would have.”

He opens his hands again, leaves them to rest against the wall, scraped and bruised. There’s blood under his fingernails. He bites his tongue. Tears fall. But the suffering, it’s not from any wound he has.

“Have you abandoned me, my Saint?” He feels one breath away from collapsing. His voice is small, so small he recalls those vague days with his father. “Have you… forsaken me? Forsaken _us?” _

He sniffs, “To save Rilla, I must kill Arum, but to kill Arum…. it would mean…. it would mean…”

He tears himself away from the wall. Damien’s eyes trail his hands once more, the knife, then his hands again. Slowly, carefully, he guides them to his chest.

“It would mean to tear my own heart from my chest.”

_ Oh. _

He looks at Arum once more, body helpless on the floor. In one certain move, he takes the knife off the wall.

“I understand, Saint Damien,” he wipes off his tears, feels blood smear on his face. “I understand now. I do.”

He sheathes the knife again, walks to Arum. His eyes are still faraway. Damien guides him to his feet with care, does not falter under his beloved’s weight.

“Come on, my love,” he urges, one step after another. “We must go.”

And so, he leads them towards the edge of the world.

———

Arum’s head is unfocused. He can feel the Keep screaming out in pain. He can barely feel his own body, but the Keep’s burning agony is clear and biting. He can barely move, his legs too weak under him. But he isn’t out of it enough not to realize where they are.

“What are you _doing?_” He bites out, every word glass torn from his throat.

Damien stops, surprised. His wide, scared eyes meet his. He reaches out a hand and, tenderly, caresses Arum’s scales.

“Arum,” he whispers, his voice sounds worn out. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“My love,” Damien steps away. Without his support, Arum falters. Damien’s expression darkens. “I was asked to kill you.”

Arum jerks back, almost losing his balance. He- he wouldn’t. Not Damien.

But Damien doesn’t reach for him, steps back and away himself, “For Rilla. To get her back, the Senate ordered me to destroy you.”

Arum realizes, suddenly, that Damien is still taking steps back. He hears the rushing waters, feels the solid ground beneath his feet, and knows.

“Don’t be ridiculous, honeysuckle,” Arum growls, the words caught between his teeth, helpless even when Damien is right in front of him. He tries to reach out for his human, but falls to his knees with a shout.

Damien’s eyes are soft. His eyes are soft and sad. Worst of all, they’re determined. When he speaks, there’s some sort of parody of his sweet smile on his face, “It’s the only way, my lily. If I have to tear my heart from the space between my ribs, if I have to drag every droplet of red out of my very veins to save you, to protect you, my flowers, I will. If you but asked, I would tear myself to pieces right here, at the world’s end.”

And Arum doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want to make sense of this. He wants to take his lover, his honeysuckle, and beat sense into him, wants to kiss him senseless and protect him from himself, from the Senate.

“But you would never ask, my dear. You would never take of me that which I have always offered, even if you didn’t quite know I did. Still, they have. If I must choose between a happy life of my own or two for the ones I must love, then I can only hope this is as honorable end as the saints want for me.”

He is moving, walking away from Arum while he is frozen in place. The smile in his face is faltering, just a little bit, but the love in his eyes stays. It’s what hurts the most, the devotion.

He would have always done this, Arum realizes. No matter if Rilla and him had left Damien behind. Regardless of their love for him, Damien would always have…

“I am tranquil,” Sir Damien the Pious says, one foot over the edge of the world. “I will fulfill my duty to you, my heart, and step off the edge of this world.”

_ “Honeysuckle!” _

“Arum…”

“Damien,” he pleads. “Don’t—!”

“Arum,” Damien smiles. “I love you.”

And as Arum watches, horrified, he falls.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted from my tumblr, you can find me @damienthepious!


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